Barbara Ehrenreich comments on working in America

November 03, 2009

The Swine Flu Vaccine Screw-up

Optimism as a Public Health Problem
By Barbara Ehrenreich

If you can't find any swine flu vaccine for your kids, it won't be for
a lack of positive thinking. In fact, the whole flu snafu is being
blamed on "undue optimism" on the part of both the Obama administration
and Big Pharma.

Optimism is supposed to be good for our health. According to the
academic "positive psychologists," as well as legions of unlicensed
life coaches and inspirational speakers, optimism wards off common
illnesses, contributes to recovery from cancer, and extends longevity.
To its promoters, optimism is practically a miracle vaccine, so
essential that we need to start inoculating Americans with it in the
public schools -- in the form of "optimism training."

But optimism turns out to be less than salubrious when it comes to public
health. In July, the federal government promised to have 160 million
doses of H1N1 vaccine ready for distribution by the end of October.
Instead, only 28 million doses are now ready to go, and optimism is the
obvious culprit. "Road to Flu Vaccine Shortfall, Paved With Undue
Optimism," was the headline of a front page article in the October 26th
New York Times. In the conventional spin, the vaccine shortage
is now "threatening to undermine public confidence in government." If
the federal government couldn't get this right, the pundits are already
asking, how can we trust it with health reform?

But let's stop a minute and also ask: Who really screwed up here --
the government or private pharmaceutical companies, including
GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis, and three others that had agreed to
manufacture and deliver the vaccine by late fall? Last spring and
summer, those companies gleefully gobbled up $2 billion worth of
government contracts for vaccine production, promising to have every
American, or at least every American child and pregnant woman, supplied
with vaccine before trick-or-treating season began.

According to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, the
government was misled by these companies, which failed to report
manufacturing delays as they arose. Her department, she says, was
"relying on the manufacturers to give us their numbers, and as soon as
we got numbers we put them out to the public. It does appear now that
those numbers were overly rosy."

If, in fact, there's a political parable here, it's about Big
Government's sweetly trusting reliance on Big Business to safeguard the
public health: Let the private insurance companies manage health
financing; let profit-making hospital chains deliver health care; let
Big Pharma provide safe and affordable medications. As it happens,
though, all these entities have a priority that regularly overrides the
public's health, and that is, of course, profit -- which has led
insurance companies to function as "death panels," excluding those who
might ever need care, and for-profit hospitals to turn away the
indigent, the pregnant, and the uninsured.

As
for Big Pharma, the truth is that they're just not all that into
vaccines, traditionally preferring to manufacture drugs for such
plagues as erectile dysfunction, social anxiety, and restless leg
syndrome. Vaccines can be tricky and less than maximally profitable to
manufacture. They go out of style with every microbial mutation, and
usually it's the government, rather than cunning direct-to-consumer
commercials, that determines who gets them. So it should have been no
surprise that Big Pharma approached the H1N1 problem ploddingly, using
a 50-year old technology involving the production of the virus in
chicken eggs, a method long since abandoned by China and the European
Union.

Chicken eggs are fine for omelets, but they have quickly proved to
be a poor growth medium for the viral "seed" strain used to make H1N1
vaccine. There are alternative "cell culture" methods
that could produce the vaccine much faster, but in complete defiance of
the conventional wisdom that private enterprise is always more
innovative and resourceful than government, Big Pharma did not demand
that they be made available for this year's swine flu epidemic. Just
for the record, those alternative methods have been developed with
government funding, which is also the source of almost all our basic
knowledge of viruses.

So, thanks to the drug companies, optimism has been about as
effective in warding off H1N1 as amulets or fairy dust. Both the
government and Big Pharma were indeed overly optimistic about the
latter's ability to supply the vaccine, leaving those of us who are
involved in the care of small children with little to rely on but hope
-- hope that the epidemic will fade out on its own, hope that our loved
ones have the luck to survive it.

And contrary to the claims of the positive psychologists, optimism
itself is neither an elixir, nor a life-saving vaccine. Recent studies
show that optimism -- or positive feelings -- do not affect recovery
from a variety of cancers, including those of the breast, lungs, neck,
and throat. Furthermore, the evidence that optimism prolongs life has
turned out to be shaky at best: one study of nuns frequently cited as
proof positive of optimism's healthful effects turned out, in fact,
only to show that nuns who wrote more eloquently about their vows in
their early twenties tended to outlive those whose written statements
were clunkier.

Are we ready to abandon faith-based medicine of both the individual and
public health variety? Faith in private enterprise and the market has
now left us open to a swine flu epidemic; faith alone -- in the form of
optimism or hope -- does not kill viruses or cancer cells. On the
public health front, we need to socialize vaccine manufacture as well
as its distribution. Then, if the supply falls short, we can always
impeach the president. On the individual front, there's always soap and
water.

To listen to the TomDispatch
audio interview with Ehrenreich that accompanies this piece, click here.

26 Comments

"Who really screwed up here -- the government or private pharmaceutical companies..."

I don't think there's much difference. I've worked for both the government and evil corporations over the years, and find they're prone to chronic clusterfucks because they're all run by exactly the same kinds of mindless bureaucrats.

Giant corporations and government agencies span the whole range of possibilities from A to B. How 'bout adding a little Ivan Illich or Paul Goodman to the mix?

Ms. Ehrenreich states that we need to socialize vaccine manufacture and distribution. Isn't this what we have already done??!! Right now the vaccines are going to the entitled elite (Corporations received vaccines before Hospitals and General Practitioners) and not the citizens themselves. There is no proof, of course, but I would not be surprised if every member of our governmental junta in D.C. is already immunized.

Ms. Ehrenrich is right about American optimism; the general public is sitting around being optimistic, waiting for the vaccine... and getting sick in the mean time.

While she is wrong in her solution. The answer is not more government. This would just create more opportunity for corruption with more self-interested puppets controling our society.

BE, I was wondering if the same connection occurred to you as to me -- I wrote this morning about the appearance of your book and mentioned that the title reminded me of that hilarious song that ends Monty Python's "Life of Brian." I'd see for myself if you mentioned it in the book, but I've been out of work for 9 months and can't afford to buy books!

Yeah, mild. Tell that to the parents who have lost their children to this flu.
Let's just hope we can be optimistic that predictions that the flu will not become the big problem it is feared to be.
Yeah, those vulnerable people are just unlucky. Too bad. Nothing to get worked up about.

Peppernuts: "Big Pharma is doing a great job of creating a plague they can then Save The Vulnerable From."

Apparently you didn't read too closely: vaccines aren't that much of a cash cow for Pharma; they make their big money off drugs to manage chronic conditions that won't be cured very soon, like diabetes, hypertension, various heart problems, and HIV.

You're also not getting the concept of public health. Vaccinating you isn't only to keep you from getting sick, it's to keep you from spreading the disease to others who may be more vulnerable. Not to mention that even if you're right about H1N1 not being so bad, we're still poorly prepared for another pandemic like that of 1918.

Folks wake up. How about reading the insert of the H1N1 or any other vaccine. Dr. Roby Mitchell has retracted his position on the H1N1 vaccine after reading the insert on the television show "Know the Cause". In short, the insert from the vaccine states:

- Not proven to have any effect on H1N1
- No studies to determine impact on fetus
- No studies to determine effects of H1N1 vaccine with seasonal
- Can cause neurological disorder
- Contains dangerous squalene and mercury
- Can cause fertility issues
The list goes on and on. Big pharm will make their money on the long term health implications of taking these worthless shots - therapeutic levels of C,D and cleanliness, while keeping the immune system in high order is the key to warding off illnes.

How is it the government has to accept what the companies do? They were supposed to provide updates and didn't. They did not meet goals, and now you say they didn't even use appropriate methods. All the money government has is taxpayer money. Are the contracts actually written with absolutely no consequences for failure to fulfill them?

Thank you very much. Socialism is a joke? We are already there. Only the wealthy can afford to receive the best of care. Insurance already dictates when to do what test and how often the Doctor can prescribe what test or drug the Doctor can prescribe, many do not realize that the studies of new prescriptions are on humans now for sake of our animal rites. So when you take a new drug you are charged and in the study without knowing till later the consequences. Pharmaceutical companies own the politicians and the physicians. I am sick to death to hear senior citizens say but they will cut Medicare to pay for the new healthcare reform. DAH, is Medicare not broke? Or was until we borrowed money to keep it going? Medicare operates on borrowed money. America is broke. We already operate on borrowed money. The media plays fear to Americans about the deficit…like the average American knows what a Trillion dollars will buy? I am a realist, not a pessimist.

Thank you very much. Socialism is a joke? We are already there. Only the wealthy can afford to receive the best of care. Insurance already dictates when to do what test and how often the Doctor can prescribe what test or drug the Doctor can prescribe, many do not realize that the studies of new prescriptions are on humans now for sake of our animal rites. So when you take a new drug you are charged and in the study without knowing till later the consequences. Pharmaceutical companies own the politicians and the physicians. I am sick to death to hear senior citizens say but they will cut Medicare to pay for the new healthcare reform. DAH, is Medicare not broke? Or was until we borrowed money to keep it going? Medicare operates on borrowed money. America is broke. We already operate on borrowed money. The media plays fear to Americans about the deficit…like the average American knows what a Trillion dollars will buy? I am a realist, not a pessimist.

Barbara, I read a great article you wrote rejecting the current load of hogwash that passes for nutritional thinking (anti-fat, anti-cholesterol). I am surprised to hear you repeating the party line that vaccines help make us safe...Another case of night=day that I seem to wake up to every day. Simply put, vaccines are dangerous, and ineffective "as fairy dust" for anything but boosting Big Pharma's bottom line. Thank God that they have failed to manufacture enough of this poison! And that the fake H1N1 hysteria has failed to take root! (no thanks to you.) But I love your stuff generally. We're all slowly extracting ourselves from a Matrix of complex lies, and people who have a big megaphone often find themselves embarrassed in public like this.

Barbara has claimed that her Ph.D. in cell biology gives her sufficient knowledge to criticize the idea our thinking can have a positive effect on the immune system. Actually, since she got her doctorate in 1968 (in biology, not psychology), this would not qualify her to say anything definitive about the relationship between the central nervous system (i.e. thinking) and the immune system. Until 1972, it was almost dogma in the field of biology (and specifically, among immunologists) that there was a kind of impenetrable barrier between the mind and the immune system. The first indication that this wall was not so impenetrable came in 1972 with Dr. Robert Ader’s accidental discovery that conditioning affected the immune system. In the nearly 4 decades since Ader’s discovery, a whole field, psychoneuroimmunology (PNI), has developed, showing that in fact our attitudes (positive and negative) can have a clearly measurable effect on the immune system. One of the best – and most rigorously scientific – accounts of this field is Dr. Esther Sternberg’s, “The Balance Within”. If Barbara had simply said there is no evidence that the simplistic process of “positive thinking” – mindlessly repeating positive statements, for example – can affect the immune system, no researcher in the field of PNI would object. To my knowledge, none of these researchers have claimed a positive outcome for such a simplistic process. However, there have been, hundreds of studies showing that a change in attitude can “positively” affect – that is, strengthen – the immune system. These studies have been conducted by first rate scientists and many have been replicated.

It's good to see someone casting a critical eye on some aspects of positive thinking as it is often expressed. And, to a degree it's understandable that given the author's experiences that she might have a greater propensity for knee-jerk reactions to terms like "optimism." It's unfortunate, however, that she's so bitter.

I'm willing to grant that optimism for its own sake is a bad idea, but that doesn't mean optimism is to be avoided. Furthermore, I don't recall ever reading any article by any reputable professional in the cognitive sciences (to include psychology) suggesting that optimism is a prescription for healing cancer or any other disease. That it doesn't is hardly a revelation, or a reason to avoid it.

Friendship doesn't heal cancer either, but should we therefore avoid that too?

I think the screw-up rests with governments and WHO, both of whom were bought by H1N1 vaccine pharma.

The most recent former head of the CDC who blithely committed a couple of nations and millions of dollars to a vaccine that has never had randomized controlled trials (therefore, we don't know if works) has been rewarded for her efforts by Merck.

Well, I agree that attempts must be made towards eradication of this dreadful disease. Fir the H1N1 vaccine screw-up, I solely hold WHO responsible because it was the one who broached the topic of need for a vaccine to the governments.

I think the screw-up rests with governments and WHO, both of whom were bought by H1N1 vaccine pharma.

The most recent former head of the CDC who blithely committed a couple of nations and millions of dollars to a vaccine that has never had randomized controlled trials (therefore, we don't know if works) has been rewarded for her efforts by Merck.

and literally hundreds more (1123 hits on pubmed for "psychoneuroimmunology," though i'm sure much of that, as with most modern reductionist science, is faulty) but i don't have the time to dig through and select articles which will not be read anyhow.